Napolitano confirms gang killed agent

An elite Border Patrol squad was pursuing a gang that preyed on drug smugglers when Agent Brian Terry was shot and killed Tuesday night in a remote canyon near Rio Rico, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Friday.

"They were seeking to apprehend what's called a 'rip crew,' which is a name given to a crew that is organized to seek to rip off people who are drug mules or traversing the border illegally," she said during a meeting with The Arizona Republic's editorial board. "That's why they were in that area."

Her comments were the first official confirmation that Terry and other members of the Border Patrol's specially trained tactical unit known as BORTAC were pursuing bandits the night the 40-year-old agent was killed in a gunbattle.

Four suspects, including one who was wounded in the shootout, are in custody. A fifth individual is at large.

Napolitano, a former Arizona governor, state attorney general and U.S. attorney, declined to provide details about the suspects or elaborate on the circumstances of Terry's death, citing the ongoing investigation.

She was joined at the meeting by Alan Bersin, commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the Homeland Security agency that includes Border Patrol.

Napolitano toured parts of the border Friday and met with some of Terry's colleagues as part of a trip to Arizona that had been planned before Terry was killed. But she reworked her schedule to meet with agents and praise the work they have done to increase security along the border, where the number of agents is at an all-time high.

"Here's the message that I gave to our Border Patrol agents down there, which is that the work they are doing is producing very, very strong results," she said. "And you can see that in every metric. . . . There is no doubt that that border, which I know very well, having dealt with it since '93 when I became U.S. attorney here, is a very different place than it was five years ago, six years ago."

Napolitano cited FBI crime statistics showing that violent crime in Arizona, Texas, California and New Mexico has declined sharply in recent years. She said that agents have been, and still are, surging into the Border Patrol's Tucson Sector in Arizona and that the National Guard will continue to maintain a border presence.

"We're seizing more currency, we're seizing more drugs, we're seizing more guns, and so those numbers are going up," she said. "And the illegal-immigrant apprehensions are down, which, again, is a measure that overall illegal immigration is down. So the numbers that need to be going up are going up, and the numbers that need to be going down are going down, and substantially so."

The number of illegal-immigrant apprehensions in Arizona has plummeted from a high of 725,093 in fiscal 2000 to 219,318 in fiscal 2010, which ended on Sept. 30, Homeland Security statistics show.

Napolitano said she thinks the trend will continue.

"I believe that by the end of next year, we will have cut these numbers from 219,000 down to near 100,000," Napolitano said. "That would be my prediction. It may be a little more. It may be a little less. But something in that zone."

The decrease in illegal-immigrant apprehensions likely is a combination of the poor economy and the increased deterrence from additional Border Patrol agents, improved technology and border fencing, she said.

Congress has authorized funding for an additional 1,000 Border Patrol agents, who are being hired and trained. Napolitano said a "big swath" of the new agents will be assigned to the Tucson Sector.

Bersin cited the increased staffing and technology on the border as a crucial factor in the four suspects in Terry's slaying being apprehended so quickly in such a remote, rugged area.

He concurred with Napolitano's characterization of the border as safer and more secure than it has been in years but cautioned that the stepped-up enforcement efforts and aggressive steps taken "to dismantle these entrenched smuggling and organized-crime groups" increase the danger for Border Patrol agents.

"They know that they stand between the American people and the Arizona community and this kind of danger," Bersin said. "That shooting, in fact, in some ways is the result of a challenge that is being made by law enforcement here to organized crime."

Terry's death this week has rekindled concerns about Mexico's bloody drug war spilling across the border into the United States.

But Napolitano said it would be wrong to conclude from Terry's death, as well as the killing of longtime southern Arizona rancher Robert Krentz, that drug violence is on the rise or rampant along the border. Krentz's March slaying in Cochise County remains unsolved. The Krentz killing became an issue in this year's congressional midterm elections and contributed to the Arizona Legislature's passage of the state's controversial immigration-enforcement law known as Senate Bill 1070.

"They were terrible crimes, and crimes occur, even when overall numbers are down," Napolitano said.

Napolitano and Homeland Security

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano met with editors and reporters at The Arizona Republic on Friday for a wide-ranging discussion. She explained the Department of Homeland Security's five major missions.

Counterterrorism: "Even though it is the Department of Homeland Security, actually a lot of our work is done internationally in all parts of the world, and we have a footprint all over the world. Because a lot of times if we wait until something gets to the United States, we have missed several opportunities to prevent, to interdict and the like."

Immigration enforcement: "I view this kind of like a prosecutor does. You set priorities. . . . You really want to make sure you are using your resources in the best way as possible. We set a key priority on deporting and removing from the country criminal aliens, and we are now beginning to see the results of that policy change."

Protecting cyberspace: "That needs to be done not as a top-down phenomenon but as a partnership between government and private sector who rely on cybernetworks for the control of critical infrastructure."

Napolitano also talked about the Dream Act, which the Senate could vote on today. The measure would grant legal status to people who were brought illegally to the U.S. as children if they attend college or serve in the military.

"It's the right thing to do," Napolitano said. "The students who are protected under the version of the Dream Act that will be voted on, which is a pretty stripped-down version as it were, were not responsible for their presence in the country. They were brought over by adults, and so in terms of culpability they really have no culpability for being here illegally. And there is huge human potential in these individuals."